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Comment by jarin | Hacker News Reader

I've had similar situations happen before. Usually what I do is call the phone support, quickly run through everything I tried, and the first-line tech support guy transfers me to a call center in the US with higher-level technicians right away.

I don't really think there's any point in arguing with someone manning the chat help or lower-level phone support anyway as they don't seem to have the ability to run the more advanced diagnostics even if they wanted to. All arguing with them is going to do is frustrate you. Just work with their system a little and you can usually get things taken care of.

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I'm not AT&T's "partner", I'm their customer. I pay them for service. I shouldn't have to find the optimal path through their system to get things done. Move to a different ISP, plain and simple. There's no reason the customer should be inconvenienced because they can't get their act together. It seems like a no-brainer to me, especially since some ISP's will give heavy discounts to jump ship from their competitors.

I agree with you. But if you want to actually get the problem fixed in real life instead of in a theoretical best-of-all-worlds, just dial the phone number. You can lead the revolution against AT&T after you get your internets back.

You could always ask to speak to their customer retention department (i.e. phone and say "I want to cancel my service") and then ask to be transferred directly to a line tech once you have a retention agent on the line. They're a lot more flexible in what they can do for you.

Absolutely.

Tangentially - I ordered ISDN service from Qwest about a year ago. The business ordering agent (ISDN is only tariffed for businesses in Washington) transferred me to a supervisor, who then told me to hang up and call the retention department, and gave me the number. Retentions was able to transfer me to the person who was responsible for ISDN ordering, who was very knowledgeable.

Lesson of the story: Retentions agents can transfer you anywhere.

It isn't always 'plain and simple' to move to a different ISP. Except for very few parts of the country, most users do not have a choice of ISPs.

I shouldn't have to find the optimal path through their system to get things done.

Consider this a "hacking a non-computer system" challenge. It is a very useful skill even if you never send YC an application, since there are at least a few organizations which are isomorphic to AT&T customer service which are very difficult for you to opt out of using. (Your local department responsible for collecting taxes, for example.)

Arguably it's not a non-computer system if the customer service rep is just a front-end for a finite state machine.

As someone who has the option of low speed dsl and satellite internet moving through the system as quick as possible and getting answers quickly is very handy.

But if you have other worthwhile choices that's great, until you run out of choices and have to go through the same system again. (Most ISPs seem to run a similar support scheme.)

99% of their customers would benefit from talking to that tech support person. As infuriating as the conversation was for a knowledgable person, it would probably suffice to resolve most technical issues people have.

I think the mistake was admitting to having a mac. A rule of thumb is to pretend that the computer is Windows / IE so the rep can go by the book.

But you aren't willing to pay for that, plain and simple.

Where do you think the money comes from to offer the jump ship discounts? The sky?

Just work with their system a little and you can usually get things taken care of.

It's pretty clear that the person who wrote the blog post has made multiple attempts to get help with issues from AT&T, both over the Internet and phone, and has found that it is just way too hard. Time is a limited resource.

The right solution is to switch ISPs. Unfortunately, in my market, the government only allows two ISPs [both with terrible customer service] to exist, and if the OP is in the US, that's probably the situation he's in, too.

There's no indication in the post that he made any attempts to do anything using a phone, and he in fact was refusing to do so towards the end of it. Do you have any evidence that he did try to call them and encountered the same difficulties there?

really?

  I have tried repeatedly to work with AT&T phone support with zero success. I am a programmer and a network engineer, I can find any setting, etc. you want to know about on the Mac

Ah. I must have missed that. However, the opening to the post pretty clearly says that he had not done so for this particular problem, and so I'm forced to assume that he's either lying (intentionally or otherwise) or that he's referring to other incidents, which would mean that he made no attempt to resolve this incident using a phone.

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